Upbeat Music Can Make Us More Cooperative

Research has shown that music in retail settings can add value to the shopping experience: It can improve the moods of customers, increase engagement, and increase the chances of a purchase. Less studied is how music can affect employees.

In two experiments that I conducted with my colleagues Jubo Yan, Brian Wansink, and Bill Schulze (published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior), we discovered that participants were more cooperative (and less self-interested) in a group setting when they were listening to happy music.

Our findings dovetail with similar research about the effects of rhythm and synchrony. For example, Scott Wiltermuth at the University of Southern California and Chip Heath of the Stanford Graduate School of Business have shown that people are more likely to cooperate with each other after walking together in a synchronized fashion or singing together in unison.

In our case, we recruited students to participate in a 20-round public goods game, placing them in teams of three. We gave each student 10 tokens. During a round, a group member had two choices: keep some or all of the tokens or deposit them into a team fund, which the group members could split among themselves at the end of the round.

If they chose the latter — the public-good option — we multiplied their contributions by one and a half. So if all three team members contributed all of their tokens to the team pot, they each would walk away with 15 tokens (instead of 10). Or they could choose to look after their own self-interest by keeping their own tokens while still collecting the automatic redistribution of the team fund at the end of a given round.

During the game, participants didn’t know with whom they were interacting or how many rounds they would play. But they did have the real-time benefit of knowing how much (if at all) their teammates shared with them after each given round.

To increase cooperation, teams could regularly play happy music during meetings or brainstorming sessions.

To look at the relevance of musical types, we ran two separate sets of sessions. For the first, we played a loop of happy music — songs with warmth and rhythm:

“Walking on Sunshine,” by Katrina and The Waves

“Happy Days,” by Pratt and McClain

“Yellow Submarine,” by The Beatles

“Brown-Eyed Girl,” by Van Morrison

For the second set of groups, we played “unhappy” screamo music — a subgenre of emo distinguished for its arhythmic song structures and screamed lyrics. The songs included:

“Smokahontas,” by Attack Attack!

“You Ain’t No Family,” by iwrestledabearonce

At the conclusion of the experiment, we weren’t surprised to see that the students who listened to the Beatles were more cooperative than their screamo-listening peers. But we had further questions: Was the first group more cooperative because of the happy music, or was the second group less cooperative because of the screamo music?

To answer those questions, we conducted a second experiment, adding a third set of groups that wasn’t exposed to music at all. Surprisingly, the students who listened to arhythmic screamo music were no less cooperative than their peers in the no-music condition. From those results, we can reasonably infer that the happy music produced a positive effect.

Given our findings and the preponderance of music in all kinds of stores, retail managers should be more attentive to the effects that sound may have on their employees, not just their customers. They should also consider the effects that other atmospherics — including lighting, paint color, and smell — could have on their frontline staff.

Coworkers who eat together tend to perform at a higher level than their peers — yet cafeterias are often undervalued by companies.

Other managers should take note as well. Even though the effects of happy music may seem like a mundane phenomenon, it shouldn’t be ignored. In my research, I’ve learned that the things that managers often overlook or take for granted can have a big impact in the workplace. For example, I’ve found that coworkers who eat together tend to perform at a higher level than their peers — yet cafeterias are often undervalued by companies.

To increase cooperation, teams could regularly play happy music during meetings or brainstorming sessions, a simpler and cost-effective alternative to traditional team-building exercises and off-site retreats.

Although there’s more research to be done, music represents a potentially valuable and inexpensive channel for improving performance in environments where cooperation is prized.